Growing the Bicycle Love

I am addicted to bikes. I like to build them and I like to ride them. I fill houses and basements with them. I leave trails of them as I move from place to place. These days, if it’s Monday or Wednesday, I am either already at the bike shop or looking forward to getting there. This is not just any bike shop, but our community bike shop in downtown Troy – Troy Bike Rescue.

Most cyclists in the region have at least heard of the Troy Bike Rescue – a bike recycling operation with workshops in both Albany and Troy. I started TBR in 2001 as an interventionist art project. I was removing bikes from the Department of Public Works dumpster and holding potluck style barbecues to fix the bikes and give them away. The meetings grew to be regular, a base of volunteers formed, we got some money together to buy some good tools, and TBR was born. On a given week each shop will serve 10-50 people, helping them adopt bikes, repair their own bikes, or learn the skills to teach others.

My friendship with the bicycle, however, began long before the early days of recycling bikes in upstate NY. I learned to ride before I can really remember. Growing up on a farm in Western Pennsylvania was like having my own BMX track, and my cousins and and I would ride endlessly. Around age 14, in the early 90s, my folks bought me a Schwinn Mt. Bike. Our middle-school gang built single track downhill trails in our woods. We thought of them like ski slopes – they each had names. We would pedal or push up the road and bomb down the trails, over and over and over again. In high school I spent a couple summers racing pretty competitively throughout West Virginia. I still rode the little trails on the farm, but my hardtail Barracuda spent a lot of time on top of my car, waiting patiently as I drove regularly into the Laurel Mountains for some of the sweetest single track Western PA has to offer.

Riding a log on a borrowed downhill bike in Oregon

After college I moved to Boston and became a messenger. When I bought a single speed from a guy in South Boston, it was the first time I had ever ridden on skinny tires. Holy crap! I was flying. City traffic was a lot like riding fast in the woods, except the trees were moving and made of metal. I became hooked on what was an entirely new kind of riding for me. Urban biking also allowed me to begin to see the bicycle differently – as a superior form of transportation to the automobile. Moreover, I began to see that in cities where lot of people commute by bike there is a subculture that surrounds what on the surface seems to be merely a transportation choice. This realization was broadened when a few years later I spent time living in NYC, also working for a stint as a messenger and later commuting daily to a desk job. I got involved in the bike activism scene and found myself practically accidentally co-directing a documentary called Still We Ride about the campaign of repression against monthly Critical Mass rides in 2004-05. In the process, I researched the rise of the ride in the early 90s in San Francisco to find that its history essentially paralleled the rise of bicycling as an identifiable lifestyle and as Critical Mass rides spread across the country, the number of cyclists in those cities grew proportionally. Regardless of your participation or opinions on Critical Mass, if you are a cyclist, you know that biking is just that – a lifestyle. I think it is one worthy of further proliferation.

Playing Bike Polo in Troy

So for the past couple years I have been back here in the capital district and pretty bent on creating culture around the bicycle as a form of transportation. Bicycles make sense. Zero gallons per mile and fun too! Riding a bicycle for daily transportation changes one’s perspective on time, and provides an entirely different perception of one’s surroundings. Bikes certainly aren’t the answer to all our problems, but they are a very good place to get started.

I hope you all stay tuned for more articles about commuting, hauling, political organizing, summer touring, group rides, and DIY bike culture.